KEYWORDS: History of cartography; t...

KEYWORDS: History of cartography; thematic cartography, 20th hundred years cartography, Germany, Austria, Switzerland

In their contribution to the late special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science onward "Exploratory Essays: History of Cartography in the Twentieth Century" (Vol 29 No. 3 pp 305-321) McMaster and McMaster make the claim that "although the main disentanglement of thematic mapping can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe it is in the twentieth-century United States that thematic cartography evolv as an academic discipline" (p 306) In this commentary, I will argue and provide evidence for the idea that fundamental contributions to the increase of academic thematic ...